Rabbi Ezra Attiya הרב עזרא עטיה

Halab—Aleppo—was his birthplace (5645), and the Old City of Jerusalem became his home: he came there with his family at sixteen, as the Aleppo rabbis were then moving there. He studied with Rabbi Chaim Shaul Dweck and Rabbi Solomon Eliezer Alfandari.

Porat Yosef. The yeshiva opened in 5683 and he came as its mashgiach; two years later, after the death of the rosh yeshiva, he took its head—and held it forty-five years, until his death in 5730. Before him, full day-long yeshiva study was reckoned among Sephardim to be an Ashkenazi affair; after him it was not. Out of his yeshiva came Rabbi Ovadia Yosef and Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu—both later chief rabbis of Israel—Rabbi Ben Zion Abba Shaul, Rabbi Yehuda Tzadka, Rabbi Yitzchak Kaduri.

The shop. They tell of him what is rarely told of a rosh yeshiva. The father of one student, a poor man, took his son out of the yeshiva: there was nobody to mind the shop. Rabbi Attiya came and offered to mind the shop himself in the boy's place. The father was ashamed and sent his son back. The student was Ovadia Yosef.

The fire. In 5708, in the war, the yeshiva building in the Old City burned, and with it thousands of pages of his own unpublished writings. He refused to restore them: the time, he said, was better given to his students. So there are almost no books after him, and a whole generation of students.

He taught not only Gemara: to his own he gave Chovot ha-Levavot and demanded musar—quietly, in the Sephardi way, without Lithuanian severity.